Yahoo goes full steam ahead with 'open' strategy

When Yahoo announced its Y OS (Yahoo Open Strategy) last week, it offered a vision that, if realized, could give back the company the mojo it lost several years ago.

With Y OS, Yahoo pledges to open all its sites, online services and Web applications to outside developers, and give users a "social profile" dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services.

The ambitious plan is designed to let Yahoo radically improve its position in key areas like search and social networking and thus make a run at competitors like Google, MySpace, and Facebook. With Yahoo in the midst of fending off Microsoft's takeover attempt, the success of the strategy appears even more important.

This week, IDG News Service got more details about Y OS from Neal Sample, the company's chief platforms architect, who said the project began forming early last year and was launched internally in September. An edited transcript of the interview follows:

IDGNS: Did Y OS trigger a widespread revision of existing initiatives?

Sample: In formulating this strategy, we had a lot of input from the properties [like Yahoo Mail, Messenger, and Flickr]. We talked about what we wanted to do and how we wanted to forge a new Yahoo, and we got everyone on board. Once we had that alignment, it helped shape the vision.

It's a staged deployment approach. The properties will reflect in coming months elements of the Y OS strategy. The first deployment is search [via the Search Monkey project]. We took one of our largest and most important canvases, and one which has one of the most stringent performance requirements, and we began by opening that up to developers.

IDGNS: Was the trigger for Y OS the realization that Yahoo users have flocked to social networks like MySpace and Facebook, drawn by elements they haven't been able to find in Yahoo, even while they continue to use Yahoo services?

Sample: Absolutely. Yahoo was very homogeneous at first, but grew up very quickly over 14 years and branched out into many verticals and properties, organically and through acquisitions. We're No. 1 in seven different verticals and compete in many more, so users come to Yahoo to get the utility [of our services and applications]. Now comes the next logical step with Y OS. We've learned from our competition that social [networking] is an important dimension, regardless of whether or not it's treated as a destination [site].

Ours is a very different proposition from some of our [social-networking] competitors who may be struggling to find utility in the application space -- in e-mail and instant messaging [services], finance, news, or sports [properties] -- and build that type of anchor property on top of their social network.

We have the foundation: very strong utilities and applications. The next evolution will be to add social as a feature on top of the utility instead of the other way around. When you realize the assets Yahoo has, it's funny to see our [social-networking] competitors, to some extent, try to discover and build those.